By September 2020, more than 150 creator accounts had each passed the milestone of 1 billion views.įace filters on social media might seem technologically unimpressive compared with some other uses of AR, but Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, says the real-time puppy filters are actually quite a technological feat. The majority of filters on Facebook’s various products are created by third-party users, and in the first year its tools were available, more than 400,000 creators released a total of over 1.2 million effects. A spokesperson said that “200 million daily active users play with or view Lenses every day to transform the way they look, augment the world around them, play games, and learn about the world,” adding that more than 90% of young people in the US, France, and the UK use the company’s AR products.Īnother measure of popularity might be how many filters exist. Snapchat boasts its own stunning numbers. They are subjects in an experiment that will show how the technology changes the way we form our identities, represent ourselves, and relate to others. Today, according to Bloomberg, almost a fifth of Facebook’s employees-about 10,000 people- are working on AR or VR products, and Mark Zuckerberg recently told The Information, “I think it really makes sense for us to invest deeply to help shape what I think is going to be the next major computing platform, this combination of augmented and virtual reality.” Facebook and Instagram alone claim that over 600 million people have used at least one of the AR effects associated with the company’s products: a spokesperson said that beauty filters are a “popular category” of effects but would not elaborate further. TikTok’s beauty filter, meanwhile, is part of a setting called “Enhance,” where users can enable a standard beautification on any subject.Īnd they are incredibly popular. Snapchat offers a gallery of filters where users can swipe through beauty-enhancing effects on their selfie camera. Instagram bundles beauty filters with its other augmented-reality facial filters, like those that add a dog’s ears and tongue to a person’s face. In 2013, Oxford Dictionaries selected “selfie” as the word of the year, and by 2015 Snapchat had acquired the Ukrainian company Looksery and released the “Lenses” feature, much to the delight of Veronica’s middle school clique.įilters are now common across social media, though they take different forms. The app offered quick messaging through pictures, and the selfie was an ideal medium for visually communicating one’s reactions, feelings, and moods. The rise of MySpace and Facebook internationalized selfies in the early 2000s, and the launch of Snapchat in 2011 marked the beginning of the iteration that we see today.

In May of 1999, Japanese electronics manufacturer Kyocera released the first mobile phone with a front-facing camera, and selfies started to break out to the mainstream. The movement is rooted in Japanese “kawaii” culture, which obsesses over (typically girly) cuteness, and it developed when purikura-photo booths that allowed customers to decorate self-portraits-became staples in Japanese video arcades in the mid-1990s. These real-time video filters are a recent advance, but beauty filters more broadly are an extension of the decades-old selfie phenomenon. The result can be anything from changing eye colors to planting devil horns on a person’s head. Once that has been built, a universe of fantastical graphics can be attached to the mesh. A computer detects a face and then overlays an invisible facial template consisting of dozens of dots, creating a sort of topographic mesh.

They use computer vision to interpret the things the camera sees, and tweak them according to rules set by the filters’ creator. The rise of selfie cultureīeauty filters are essentially automated photo editing tools that use artificial intelligence and computer vision to detect facial features and change them. And it’s all happening without much oversight. Researchers don’t yet understand the impact that sustained use of augmented reality may have, but they do know there are real risks-and with face filters, young girls are the ones taking that risk. The face filters that have become commonplace across social media are perhaps the most widespread use of augmented reality. “So if I’m not wearing makeup or if I think I don’t necessarily look my best, the beauty filter sort of changes certain things about your appearance and can fix certain parts of you.” “When I’m going to use a face filter, it’s because there are certain things that I want to look different,” she explains.

Perfect face filter snapchat